In recent years, the media industry has expanded its horizons beyond traditional analog technologies. Numerous systems have been developed for transmitting video information digitally from one location to be viewed in real time at another location. One difficulty associated with providing video data in digital format is the bandwidth required to deliver a high quality picture in real time. Consequently, many techniques have been developed for compressing the representation of digital video. However, the more compressed the digital video stream, the more information that is lost in the compression process and the lower the quality of the video image displayed to the viewer.
To compensate for low bandwidth, video may be delivered with fewer frames per second and/or with less resolution. It is not uncommon for digital video to be delivered in resolutions that are significantly smaller than the resolution supported by the device being used to view the video. For example, real-time video is often delivered in 120 by 160 pixel resolution, when most digital viewing devices support resolutions of 640 by 480 and above.
Various video compression techniques have been developed. One popular compression technique is known as wavelet transform, which is described in many publications including "A VLSI Architecture for Real-Time Hierarchical Encoding/Decoding of Video Using the Wavelet Tranform", Mohan Vishwanath, Chaitali Chakrabarti, ICASSP 1994, and "VLSI Architecture for Discrete Wavelet Transforms", Parhi, Keshab; Nishitani, Takao IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems, vol. 1, No. 2, June 1993. Another popular compression technique is known as MPEG compression, which follows international standards: ISO/IEC 13818-1, 2, 3 (MPEG-2) and ISO/IEC 11172-1, 2, 3 (MPEG-1). Documents that describe these standards are available from ISO/IEC Copyright Office Case Postale 56, CH 1211, Geneve 20, Switzerland.
Different compression techniques require different amounts of computational power to perform compression. If a video server has enough computational power, digital video may be compressed during the delivery of the digital video to a viewer in real time ("on the fly"). If a video server does not have enough computational power to perform on-the-fly compression, digital video may be pre-compressed before real-time delivery of the video begins.
Typically, a video server that delivers digital video that is compressed on-the-fly will determine the bandwidth available to send the video to a particular destination (the "client") before initiating the transmission of the video. The video server will then select a compression ratio based on the available bandwidth. For example, a higher compression ratio will be selected to deliver video to a client that is connected to the server through a 14.4K baud modem than will be selected to deliver video to a client that is connected to the server through a 28.8K baud modem. This compression ratio will typically be in effect for the duration of the delivery of video to that particular client.
A video server that delivers digital video that is pre-compressed may not be free to adjust the compression ratio of a stream of digital video data based on the bandwidth to a particular client. Consequently, digital video that is pre-compressed is often pre-compressed with low-bandwidth clients in mind. Thus, even high-bandwidth clients often receive low-resolution, low-quality video images.
Often, users would like to be able to create a "snapshot" of the video image that is being supplied to a client. For example, the video may be of a basketball game and the user may wish to have a snapshot of a star player making a slam dunk. The ability to create snapshots may also be useful for business situations. For example, it may be desirable to have a snapshot of a diagram or white board that is momentarily displayed during a video conference.
Using current technology, such snapshots can be created by performing a "screen capture" or "screen dump" while the desired image is being displayed to the viewer. Unfortunately, the size and quality of such snapshots will be no better than the size and quality of the video image as it is delivered in real time. As explained above, the quality of the real time image is reduced by the constraints imposed by the need to supply the video image in real time over a narrow bandwidth.
Video capture mechanisms that produce digital photographs from analog video signals generated from external video devices have been developed. However, such mechanisms generally do not work with digital input. Further, such hardware mechanisms do not have to address the quality limitations associated with the real-time delivery of digital video over media with limited bandwidths. In addition, such video capture mechanisms require the recipient of the photograph to acquire special additional hardware.
Based on the foregoing, it is clearly desirable to provide a mechanism that allows a user to obtain a snapshot of a video image, where the snapshot has a size and quality that is not dictated by the bandwidth between the video server and the client. It is further desirable to increase the quality of the video image received by a client with a limited bandwidth in response to conditions that allow the higher quality image to be sent over the limited bandwidth.